


Present Tense

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst, Before Full Circle, Deep Conversations, F/M, Kirsten Beyer, NovelCompliant, Post-Endgame, prequel to 'He Promises her Venice'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-08-17
Packaged: 2018-12-16 11:50:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11828160
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: "Mark tips his head to the side, and the smile of pity which lifts one corner of his mouth makes her shudder.They talk about inane things; about his latest academic paper (it's good, she's read some of it in the little spare time she has), about her frenetic schedule as Starfleet's new poster girl.On her third whiskey, she finally plucks the courage from her depleted supply of bravery."Does Carla know you're here Mark?""





	Present Tense

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MiaCooper](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiaCooper/gifts).



> A huge, massive thank you to MiaCooper for beta-ing this. And my deepest apologies for failing to return the favour. I promise I will...one day. 
> 
> You could read this a prequel to my story 'He Promises her Venice' if you were so inclined. 
> 
>  
> 
> Disclaimer: I write for fun, and I don't own anything.

 

* * *

She risks a glance over Decan's shoulder, cringing inwardly when she sees the gruelling itinerary for tomorrow; an endless scroll of public engagements, interviews, panels. Her temples burn with the prospect of another early rise, another meet and greet. She feels useless as she is, stretched beyond what she's supposed to be. She's genuinely considering disappearing into a miasma of nothing, taking a shuttle, and going away from Earth and never coming back. The irony of that is certainly not lost on her. 

She feels like a curio; passed around indelicately, yellowing at the edges. Worn. 

They pull up outside the hotel, and the rain is bouncing off the sidewalks, splattering up onto the gold piping around her dress trousers. New York, in this respect, is predictable.

As he holds the door open, her Aide gives her a pitying glance, and her driver (a young ensign who's taken with her fame in a way Kathryn finds mildly endearing, if not disconcerting) does too. It's infuriating. 

They feel for her, but it doesn't matter. 

She draws glances, now, wherever she goes and she's grateful for the busyness in the lobby; the more people, the bigger the likelihood she won't be spotted. 

There's no such luck tonight, and as someone calls her name, her bones and muscles clench. She considers ignoring it for a moment, but her better judgment tells her that doing so will only result in bad press. She never used to think like that, but now it's reflexive; a result of the relentless coven of journalists who seem to accumulate wherever she goes. She stalls, her boots coming to a halt on the marble, and Decan and the driver stall behind her.

"Admiral?"

She doesn't answer, instead she sucks in a deep breath, fortifies herself to face whatever she has to. 

And for a moment her memory hitches, stumbles over a face she knows well; it's like seeing a road she's intimately acquainted with, but on a map she cannot fathom.

She feels her shoulders sag, and the breath she's been holding seeps out of her lungs. 

"Mark."

It's been a long time since she's spoken that name, and it trips off her tongue on the breath she'd withheld; unsure and tentative.

Even she forgives herself for that - he's a character from the pages of a story she set aside long ago. 

He grins, disarming, but not devastatingly so, and strides towards her.

She girds herself, stiffens as he pulls her into his arms. He smells the same, but it hasn't travelled well across the years. She thinks, fleetingly, of another scent.   Earthy, underscored by the scent of wood. She shakes it away. 

"Kathryn," he pulls back, holds her at arm's length to inspect her.

She imagines she fails, and she rocks onto her tiptoes and bites at her own lip to swallow her sudden self-consciousness. The silence stretches across the whole lobby as he examines her.

"You look good Kath."

Ruined. Old. Done.

There are so many words he should say. He lies, instead, but it hurts less. She lifts her head and smiles in the face of his perfidy.

"You do too."

He squeezes her shoulders, and she feels his fingers on the sharp angles of her shoulder blades. He pulls her into his embrace one more, muttering his delight, and she does all she can to stop herself fleeing. 

His arms - strong, gentle - are too potent a reminder of someone else. 

"Have a drink with me?"

The absurd fact that she almost looks at her Aide for permission is reason enough not to decline him.

"I'll be in the bar Decan," she pivots her heels towards the entrance.

"But Admiral-"

"I know, I know I have a busy day and an inhumanely early start," she interrupts, temper floating just below the surface of not wanting to cause a public scene. "I trust you'll do your job as efficiently as always and make sure some things are moved around. I'll be in the bar." 

Her Aide gives her a harried look, but nods and slumps off with her driver.

She leans towards him conspiratorially. 

"I would swear High Command have ordered him to spy on me."

It's a joke, but a part of her is so insecure that it's also true.

He laughs, "You behave so badly now?"

"The Delta Quadrant will do that to you," she smiles, but this time there is no joke in it at all.

"What will you have?" Mark motions to a secluded booth in the corner and she slides in, grateful for the anonymity. 

"Scotch please."

He frowns, "Hard stuff for a women who used to only drink wine."

"Someone once told me my softer edges had been hardened. Not that there were many of them in the first place."

She doesn't know why she repeats that, why it's the first thing that comes to her mind. Maybe it's because it's been stuck in her skin for so long, like a poisonous splinter, and extracting it has become something she has avoided doing. Or it's been sitting on the tip of her tongue for months, weighing down every word she utters, since he said it to her in her Ready Room as Earth floated mockingly beside.

_You used to be soft Kathryn, but all your softer edges have hardened. Not that there were many to begin with._

Mark tips his head to the side, and the smile of pity which lifts one corner of his mouth makes her shudder.

They talk about inane things; about his latest academic paper (it's good, she's read some of it in the little spare time she has), about her frenetic schedule as Starfleet's new poster girl.

On her third whiskey, she finally plucks the courage from her depleted supply of bravery. 

"Does Carla know you're here Mark?"

He circles his fingers around the rim of the crystal glass in front of him, then looks up from below lidded eyes.

"I thought about lying to her," he answers, "but then I realised there was no reason to. So I told her I was going to try and catch you for a drink."

She nods.

"What good would an affair do you anyway Kathryn?"

"None whatsoever," she agrees, staring into the golden liquid, "but a good one night stand wouldn't kill me."

He laughs, and shakes his head.

"With me? Come on Kath, you never really liked that element of our relationship anyway. I was always too innocent for you."

She smiles, knowing it looks bitter and exposed.

"What about that First Officer of yours, wouldn't he be hurt if you tumbled into bed with me for some unsatisfying sex?"

The glass nearly slips out of her grasp, falling from where she's perched it against her bottom lip, at the mention of him.

"Chak-I...no," she mumbles quietly, embarrassed.

Mark knows he's miscalculated immediately, but doesn't know exactly where he's gone wrong. 

"I thought-"

"You thought wrong," she shrugs.

"I just assumed-"

"All that speculation in the press?"

"No, actually," he answers, tone mildly bemused.

She finally looks up, curiosity, tinged with a generous helping of masochism, piqued.

"What then?"

"The way he looked at you."

She nearly chokes on the ice lodged in between her cheek and gum. The notion is so romantic she feels he must surely be mocking her. 

"Absolutely not."

"I assumed..." he takes a fortifying gulp of the whiskey and motions to the waiter to bring them more.

“You seemed very close at all the press conferences and all the celebrations."

"We were," she mutters, uttering it before she realised the sadness in her own voice is absolute. 

" _Were_?"

"Mark," she looks at him, "did you come here to open old wounds?"

His face darkens, "Probably."

She stands to go, but he closes his fingers around her wrist. 

"Don't. Stay, talk to me."

She can't remember the last time she talked about herself in real terms, without folding the truth up and storing it away. Over a replicated bottle of wine, somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, long before the arrival of the Admiral, she imagines.

She's still on her feet, "I can't."

"Try me Kath," he tugs at her wrist, trailing his fingers down to take her hand and pull.

"Why do you care?" She hisses angrily. "I hope it's not some misguided sense of responsibility for having consigned me to death and moving on."

"Yes, no. I don't know," he mutters. "Please sit down."

She hesitates then slides back into the seat.

"I don't need your pity," she says, before she downs the remainder of her drink. She motions to the waiter to bring another.

"I know," Mark answers. "I feel bad. I just assumed you had-"

"It was him, you know..." she takes a gulp from the glass the waiter didn't get the chance to put on the table, "said that to me. I..."

She feels tears threatening her, and the vulnerability she feels sets her teeth on edge. 

"Said what?"

God, she thinks, I had forgotten how dumb he can be. The curse of an academic.

"About the edges," her voice is shot through with impatience. There's nothing worse than having her humiliation exposed, but she's put it out there for Mark to see. 

"Fuck. That must have hurt."

The profanity catches her off guard, and she casts her eyes up to look into Mark's face. He's genuinely sad, and she doesn't know if that comforts or appals her. 

"Like hell," she tries to make it sound casual, but it's soft, and wounded. 

"Do you want to talk-"

"I don't think I know how..."she watches her own fingers play over the surface of the polished table. "I used to. I used to speak to him...but it got lost."

She realises how ineloquent she sounds, and for the first time in months she recognises how scripted her life has been for years. Every word, response, action, carefully choreographed to elicit the response she needs to survive. Here, she feels stripped bare, more than she ever did when she lay in bed with Mark.

"Kathryn, tell me what happened."

She pauses and tries to cast her mind across the galaxies and quadrants, the battles and the fights. The sleepless, painful misery of the last few years. 

"I don't know how it happened. I just know he-" the words, contrite and gauche and completely true, jam in her throat. 

"He?"

"He fell out of love with me," she hisses quickly. "I pushed him away and he did exactly what I wanted him to do. And now I'm here grieving something I never wanted."

"You're lying," he says gently. "It sounds like something you wanted. Very much."

She doesn't know what to say to that, because it's very true. She just hadn't realised until it was far too late.

"Do you still see him?"

She shakes her head, "He captains _Voyager_."

When he'd first been given the commission, she had pretended to be delighted. In fact she'd pushed for it, out of some strange masochism that was unique only to her. But it feels strangely painful; they got _Voyager_ home, with an unspoken understanding of what would happen: togetherness, a life, something. And now he's taken not only that, but her ship and crew.

"I mean..." she swallows, then reaches for the whiskey. Mark's fingers shoot out to stall her wrist.

"No more."

And she knows he's worried. She acquiesces, though the pain starts to seep back into her consciousness as the booze quickly goes. 

"What else? He wouldn't have just stopped speaking to you?"

"No," she admits. "He's left messages, even sent a handwritten letter. He sent me roses on my birthday."

That doesn't mean anything to Mark, and he smiles because he doesn't understand the nature of the gesture as it is between them. But she grimaces, because she knows it well, and feels cheated by it. 

"He does try to contact me but I can't-" she has to swallow tears. "I can't stand knowing that I've missed my chance. I've missed so many chances."

She knows how pitiable she sounds, but Mark's unplugged the dam and it's an unstoppable force within her, cathartic and damaging all at once.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean my coldness, and my cruelty and the way I ignored him for the last two years. And my singlemindedness and that fucking hologram and..." she chokes on the words at the back of her tongue, feeling them expand and become larger and larger. "And Seven. Fucking Seven. It's a double blow."

Mark looks perplexed, but then something dawns and he understands what she means. 

"He slept with the Borg girl?"

She nods, though she has absolutely no idea if he did. It's become so big and so real to her that they might as well have. And she wants it to hurt the way it does when she thinks of them like that, so she permits it. B'Elanna has casually dropped it into their brief conversations that the liaison was ended very quickly after _Voyager's_ return, but Kathryn herself hears the information only in the abstract.

Mark looks genuinely hurt for her, and she understands it. She might be slender, and passable, and occasionally sexy if she makes the effort not to be such a conniving bitch, but she's not Seven of Nine. And it goes to a place Kathryn's never had to open up before; jealousy, of another woman, and the insistent knowledge that you're not quite as up to scratch as you once thought. Old.  It hurts like it used to in high school, except it's far more fatal than that.

"But he keeps trying to contact you? Surely-"

"Pity. He feels sorry for me," she snaps. "And his irritating loyalty."

She thinks of his messages - _Kathryn, can I come and see you on my next leave? If I've done something, Admiral, I'd like to know_ _. B'Elanna says you're doing well, I'd like to judge for myself. Kathryn, please...I would like to mend whatever I've broken._

What he doesn't know is she was broken long before now.

“Were you lovers?”

He's asking, just a little, she thinks, to settle his own demons. 

" We didn’t sleep together, no," she answers. "There was you, the ship...and then I became so obsessed. I lost everything out there. And he was my one constant and I -"

She can't draw out the energy, or the honesty, to go on. 

Mark brushes his fingers over her own, and then takes her hand.

"I'm sorry."

"So is everyone. It doesn't fix it."

They are silent for a moment, and then he speaks again.

"I'm so sorry I gave up on us Kath, , I really am. I regret it every single day."

I don't, dances on her tongue. But it's not strictly true either.

"It's alright." She touches his cheek. "Please don't say that to your wife, ever." 

"I won't."

They're silent again, and she feels the conversation drawing naturally to a close. But then Mark speaks.

"Do me a favour, comm him. Just once."

She turns away, though he knows she's on the verge of tears anyway.

"I don't owe you anything Mark."

He stands up and, just like he used to, kisses her crown. Then he moves around the table, and stands in front of her.

"No, but you might owe it to him," he touches her shoulder. "And heaven knows, you owe it to yourself."

She looks up.

"And if it hurts?"

He smiles gently, "No one knows pain like you."

A laugh nearly bubbles up in her throat, but it tastes like acid.

"That's why I have all those edges."

 

In New York there are no stars, even at 3 am it's light, and the glow from Times Square a few blocks away draws her eye, like a nebula or a supernova. This doesn't occur to her for the hours she sits in the window seat, silk dressing gown pulled tightly, hair piled up. She's looking for the stars she knows, imagining them in her mind's eye, finding comfort there she has only ever knows in his presence. The whiskey has worn off, the impact of her conversation with Mark has not. 

She feels like she has no edges, she feels that life and happiness are seeping from her. 

So, she figures, if it's all going, she has nothing to lose anyway. 

And she's always thought she was made of iron. 

She sits for another hour in front of the comm unit, and her fingers flitter softly over the screen a few times before she finally plucks up the courage she needs to pull up his details and put the subspace through. 

She watches the Federation insignia spin for what feels like a lifetime before the screen whites out and he appears a second later. It takes a moment, despite the billions of miles between them, to truly register that he is in front of her. Bed-head, loose dressing gown, stars steaming behind a viewport which used to be hers. He looks breathless with anticipation, though half-awake, but perhaps she imagines it. 

"I woke you."

He smiles blearily, and she doesn't expect his next words.

"I missed you," he says gently. "I don't mind being woken by you."

"I'm sorry about the silence-"

He shakes his head.

"It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't?"

His forgiveness is endless.

"I have limitless patience for you," he grins.

With that smile growing on his face, she finds herself calming. It feels alien to her, but good. Still, she remains silent. 

“Thank goodness for that,” she says.

"I _miss_ you," he amends his statement from before. "Present tense."

She can't help but smile at that, and she sits back and curls her legs up.

He leans forward, "That's a relief. I was starting to think you were angry at me."

 She doesn't need to tread carefully.

"It wasn't you. I was angry at me. It’s taken me a while…"

They are quiet for a moment, looking at each other. 

"I need to see you Kathryn," he says softly, and it isn't her old First Officer speaking.

It's the man she was stranded on a planet with, who she nearly gave into, who's speaking now. 

"Dinner's a good start. And as an Admiral, I have privileges that let me pass through any deep space station without much question."

"Even Proxima?"

She smiles, "Especially Proxima."

He sits back, calm, but then a sense of urgency seems to overtake him.

"Whatever you need to talk about, we can. And whatever we need to mend, we can mend. Give me – us, give us a chance."

She nods, knowing there will be so much to discuss the silence will probably be deafening. This knowledge is not enough to detract from the fluttering hope burgeoning in her chest. 

"I missed you too," she says. "I miss you. Present tense." 

He smiles again and touches the screen.

"Suddenly things don't seem so bleak."

"No."

She presses her fingers to the screen too.

"It's good to have you back Kathryn." 

 


End file.
